Few questions have generated more books, articles, studies, lectures, fads, arguments, or confusion in recent years than this one: What should we eat if we want to be healthy?

We have been told to eat meat, to not eat meat, to eat only white meat, to eat mostly plants, to eat organic, to eat natural, to eat what our grandparents ate, to not eat genetically modified food, to skip carbs, to load up on carbs, eat less, eat more, to go vegan, go paleo, go South Beach, go Mediterranean, and on and on. It seems like a new set of instructions comes out every week, so it’s no wonder that people feel bewildered.

Personally, I had settled on two simple answers: 1) If you are going to eat meat, eat only grassfed. 2) Eat more fruits and veggies, just like mom said, preferably from a local organic farm.

Recent research, however, indicates we should be asking a further question: Which fruits and vegetables? Specifically, which varieties should we be eating? New science says there are huge nutritional differences within types of fruits and vegetables. An apple is not an apple is not an apple, in other words. Some varieties will keep the doctor away, but some will make your doctor cringe with concern. That’s because many popular apple varieties are badly deficient in nutrients and highly loaded with sugar. The nutrient content of the Jonathan Gold apple, as an example, is much lower than a less-widely available variety called Heritage.

For Jo Robinson, a pioneering journalist who was one of the first to broadcast the good news about the health benefits of grassfed beef, the answer to the question about what to eat is scientifically clear:

Eat on the wild side.

By “wild” she doesn’t mean the kind of wild experienced by farmers two or three generations ago either, but the really wild—as in plants that were first cultivated four hundred generations ago.

Here’s a photo of what Robinson describes as the most nutritious potatoes she knows – Purple Peruvian, French fingerling, and Ozette:

Her thesis, which she explains in her book Eating on the Wild Side, is this: the energetic campaign by humans over the centuries to make wild plants more productive, attractive, appetizing, and easier to harvest has significantly diminished the quantity and quality of their nutrients, many of which are essential to our health. These changes are so big that the fruits and vegetables we eat today are essentially modern creations.

“Compared with wild fruits and vegetables,” Robinson writes, “most of our man-made varieties are markedly lower in vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids.… Most native plants are also higher in protein and fiber and much lower in sugar than the ones we’ve devised.”

There’s another huge difference: wild plants are much higher in phytonutrients, which are bio-based compounds that protect plants from insects, disease, damaging ultraviolet light, and browsing animals. According to Robinson, more than eight thousand phytonutrients have been discovered by researchers so far, and each wild plant produces several hundred. Many of these are potent antioxidants, which fight free radicals in our bodies, responsible for damaging our eyesight, turning cells cancerous, and increasing our risk of obesity and diabetes. Phytonutrients have also been shown to reduce the risk of infection, lower blood pressure, speed up weight loss, protect the aging brain, lower “bad” cholesterol, and boost immunity.

“We will not experience optimum health until we recover a wealth of nutrients that we have squandered over ten thousand years of agriculture,” Robinson writes, “not just the last one hundred or two hundred years.”

This is a reason why this area of research is so hot today—and big business. The supplement market has exploded with phytonutrients, including pills, energy bars, juice drinks, and powders. However, Robinson says we don’t need to give money to the pharmaceutical industry to get phytonutrients back into our bodies. Instead, we can shop “with a list,” as she describes it, at our local grocery store and farmers market for fruits and vegetables that resemble their wild ancestors as closely as possible. Better yet, we can grow these varieties in a garden of our own.

Call it eating at Nature’s Café.

The original menu at the café was dominated by plants that were tough, bitter, dry, astringent, seedy, and mostly sugarless. It’s little wonder that as the agricultural revolution began to take off ten thousand years ago, early farmers worked hard to cultivate plants that were sweeter, more tender, starchy, and oily. Cultivated dates, figs, and olives were early additions to the menu. In short order, we added a long list of cereal grains, including wheat in the Old World, corn in the New World, rice in Asia, millet and sorghum in Africa.

Over time, thousands of new café items were introduced to customers, many becoming highly popular, such as coffee, farm-raised meat, and anything containing sugar. With the Industrial Revolution and the rise of food science, the menu changed dramatically once more, as did our health. As we loaded up on sweets, starch, and feedlot beef, our well-being declined proportionally.

We didn’t just lose phytonutrients in the process, Robinson says, our food has been de-flavored as well, ironically enough. That’s because the food industry selects for ease of transport and storage, uniform appearance, and high productivity (including resistance to pesticides), all of which have had a negative impact on our food’s flavor.

Here is a photo of grafitti cauliflower, which has twice as many antioxidants as other varieties:

In her book, Robinson details how we can fight back by selecting fruits and vegetables that are high in phytonutrients and other good-for-our-health qualities (describing what experts call a low-glycemic diet). She offers a basic food rule: shop by color. Fruits and vegetables that are red, orange, purple, dark green, and yellow are among the richest in phytonutrients. But there are exceptions, and not all colors are equal (think apples), which is why you’ll need to shop with a list. Here are a few quick examples:

I would only add that if you are an organic farmer, consider planting these crop varieties as well. Chefs and customers at Nature’s Café need these ingredients in order to prepare their meals, but they can’t eat them if no one plants them.

Here’s how Robinson answers the vexing question of what to eat to stay healthy:

“We can reduce our risk of disease by avoiding refined food and choosing high-phytonutrient, high-fiber fruits and vegetables that can restore a host of lost nutrients to our diet,” she writes.

Put it together and we can have the best of all worlds.

“We can get additional health benefits by ramping up our physical activity so it comes closer to our long-ago ancestors,” she concludes. “We can choose grassfed meat, which is similar to wild game meat. And we can combine this with the best of twenty-first-century medicine and can once again be healthy.”

The answer is easy: eat at Nature’s Café—every chance you get!

To Learn More

Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health by Jo Robinson. Little, Brown, and Co., New York, 2013.

The Eating on the Wild Side fruits and vegetable shopping list is available on Robinson’s website: http://www.eatwild.com

One of nature’s most important and overlooked carbon farmers is also an ancient symbol of regeneration and renewal: the scarab.

It’s a beetle, a member of the family Scarabaeidae, which includes more than 30,000 different species, part of the order Coleoptera, which encompasses 400,000 species of beetles (out of the 4 to 8 million still to be classified), constituting roughly 25 per cent of all known animal species on the planet. That’s a lot of beetles! Too many to keep in mind, so you’re forgiven if you hadn’t given them much thought. There’s one type, however, that definitely deserves our attention: the dung beetle.

It certainly caught the attention of the ancient Egyptians, who elevated the lowly dung beetle to the status of a god—and for good reason. Dung beetles united three sacred elements of their culture: sun, soil, and cattle. Scarabs fly to the dung patties created by cattle and disassemble them within hours, usually by rolling the manure into brood balls—where the beetles lay their offspring—and then burying the balls below ground in tunnels and chambers where the nutrients nourish soil microbes.

The ancient Egyptians knew this activity was critical to maintaining the health and fertility of the soil on which their civilization depended, which may be why they revered the dung beetle on a level with Osiris, the god of the underworld.

Alas, the scarab is not so revered today. In fact, dung beetle populations were nearly hammered into oblivion in the mid-twentieth century by the pesticides and insecticides of industrial agriculture. Only in recent years has their benefit to nature and agricultural ecosystems been rediscovered, including the role they can play sequestering atmospheric carbon in soil. It’s also been estimated that dung beetles can save farmers billions of dollars every year. How?

The story starts with a fly—the horn fly in particular.

Most people don’t realize that manure (dung) is a coveted resource in nature, fought over by many creatures, including the pests and parasites that literally “bug” cattle and other livestock. This includes the horn fly (Haematobia irritans—or blood-loving irritant) which arrived on American shores from Europe in 1887. The flies lay their eggs in cow pats and the larvae are incubated there (for as little as five days) until they transform themselves into new adult flies and emerge to begin their torment. Among other maladies, their persistent biting can cause infections in cattle.

A century ago, however, horn flies were not the scourge they became for a simple reason: dung beetles eliminated the manure before the eggs could hatch. A bevy of beetles can bury a field of fresh manure patties in a matter of hours—no dung, no flies!

This natural balance changed dramatically after World War II when farms, rangelands, and animals began to be sprayed with various synthetic compounds in the name of pest and parasite “control.” Not coincidently, dung beetle populations dropped dramatically (being a “pest” after all), leaving a lot of poop sitting on the ground. Horn fly populations exploded.

Flies can also serve as vectors for a variety of serious diseases that infect humans, including typhoid, cholera, amoebic dysentery, and tuberculosis. One cow patty can house as many as 450 different insect species and one pair of flies can parent as many as 1.5 million new pairs in as little as 14 weeks. Flies can quickly develop resistance to insecticides as well. For all of these reasons, in the early 1970s a handful of researchers and cattle ranchers decided to reject the application of ever-more chemicals and opted to bring back the sacred scarab instead.

Lead by US government entomologist Truman Fincher, an energetic effort began to establish viable populations of two species of dung beetle, one imported from Europe (Onthophagus taurus) and one from Africa (Onthophagus gazella), the latter via Australia where livestock producers were experiencing similar problems. In Africa, research had shown that an elephant dung pile supported 48,000 beetles, who buried the dung underground within hours.

One beneficiary of this work was Texas rancher Walt Davis, an early pioneer of high-density, short-duration cattle grazing, which he found to be ideal for the cultivation of dung beetles that trailed his herd of cattle like camp followers trailing an army of soldiers. When he quit using chemicals on his ranch in 1974, the scarab moved in.

“Those beetles really got to work,” Davis said in an interview in Dung Beetles and a Cowman’s Profits by Charles Walters. “In a paddock just vacated by a herd…in 48 hours there was no manure. It was gone!”

It was another example of returning to nature’s way of doing things, in this case dung removal.

According to Fincher, few people realized the significance of the dung beetles to ecosystems. Beetles are nature’s sanitation crew, he insisted. Their quick burial of dung hastens its decomposition, prevents the loss of nutrients, aerates the soil, and increases the depth of soil containing organic material. That sounds like a recipe for building soil and sequestering carbon.

Not only do dung beetles transport carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus underground when they remove manure, feeding the microbes a rich diet of organic food, their tunnels increase porosity in the soil, which means more water and oxygen reach the microbes as well, revving up their tiny engines. This increases storage of carbon in the soil, with important positive implications for watershed health, plant growth, food production, pollution abatement, and climate change. And all done for free—by nature!

In his book, Charles Walters points out that Onthophagus gazella was released precisely as the natural food and organic agriculture movements began to pick up steam in the US, reflecting a desire for nontoxic approaches to food production that continues to this day. “The mere existence of dung beetles,” wrote Walters, “is a greater guardian of the organic red-meat supply than all the inspection certificates and agencies of verification can account for.”

Then there’s the comic sight of beetles flying to fresh dung as if directed by radar. “No one can say that dung beetles are good flyers,” wrote Walters. “When their encased wings are uncovered like some secret weapon in a military silo, they rise up almost helicopter style, then lumber along like an early Wright Brothers plane.”

Alas, industrial agriculture and its allies were not so amused. The news that their chemicals were killing critters deemed essential to the health of rangelands was not welcome. Infamously, Truman Fincher was forced into early retirement by the US government at the behest of Industry, according to Fincher himself. His research was put on hold and his laboratory samples destroyed.

The lowly dung beetle has struggled to regain its proper place in the ecosystem ever since. Fortunately, it’s making a comeback, thanks in part to rising interest in regenerative agriculture.